Timeless Rapture: Inspired Verse from the Shangpa Masters

CONCLUSION
Ifirst met His Holiness the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala, India, when
I accompanied Bokar Rinpoché and a group of lamas who had completed
a three-year retreat at Kalu Rinpoché’s monastery in India. What
did His Holiness want to talk about with these Shangpa lamas? He never
asked about buildings or gatherings of students; what he wanted to know
was, “How is your meditation on Fierce Inner Heat? Who is proficient in
Lucid Dream?” I was surprised and delighted. I had expected a more mundane
meeting, an occasion for monastic small talk or institutional shoptalk,
but His Holiness spoke the Shangpa language.
Throughout this section on the lives of the Shangpa masters, I have
dwelled at length on the subject of this lineage as an unstructured, decentralized,
unorganized school. Just as a pickpocket who meets a saint sees
only her pockets, when persons from organized religions (even Tibetan
schools) meet Niguma, Sukasiddhi, and their spiritual children, they search
for institutional structures.
I do not suggest that Shangpa lamas have rules that prohibit public
teaching and empire building, yet my reading of the historical evidence is
that they have not done so to date. Nondual, timeless wisdom does not
change, but conditions can and do; it is entirely possible that a Shangpa
master will one day give the lineage a public presence. At the moment,
however, we meet the Shangpa lineage as it has been for many centuries.
It presents us with a stark choice: there is only one reason to involve ourselves
with it—to travel the path to enlightenment. It has no institutions,
it asks no school loyalty, it provides no support, it makes no demands, it
boasts no glorious past, it lays no plans for the future, and it has no impressive
present, except for the simple meeting of you and your spiritual master.
It’s a do-nothing lineage.
Even in the enlightened Buddhist West, it is very easy to enlist people
and resources in support of building projects, such as for temples or stu-
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